ARTIST AT WORK: DAVID ROBERTSON

ARTIST AT WORK: DAVID ROBERTSON; Rapport at the End of a Baton

By PETER MARKS

Published: November 26, 2001

PHILADELPHIA—
The voices on the tape and the musicians on the stage were seriously out of sync. ''It's too loud!'' a string player called out, glaring at the loudspeaker that had been put behind him.

David Robertson, guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was trying hard to be accommodating, the way most visitors would in someone else's home. ''Take down the voices, please,'' he said, turning to the sound engineer at the back of the concert hall before pivoting to face the players again.

Mr. Robertson, 43, has the crisp and soothing manner of a therapist, but on this occasion, he would have had every right to drop the mask. In just 36 hours he was to lead the orchestra in the premiere of a new version of ''Different Trains,'' a technically exacting modern work that requires 48 string players to perform in unison with the recorded speaking voices of elderly people, several Holocaust survivors among them.

It was such a formidable undertaking that even the composer, Steve Reich, doubted that Mr. Robertson could pull off a clean performance of the 30-minute work after only the standard three practice sessions. ''It's a hard row to hoe,'' Mr. Reich said. ''You need a lot of rehearsals to make those tempo changes.''

If Mr. Robertson had worries, he was not sharing them, not before the orchestra certainly, and not even in the privacy of his dressing room after the rehearsal. ''We were working so hard just to stay with the darned tape'' was the closest he came to acknowledging any jitters.

Despite his cool exterior, the conductor was fully aware that this was a crucial concert date in a career increasingly filled with big evenings. Mr. Robertson, who was born in Southern California, is the music director of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France. His name seems to crop up on every search committee's short list to lead this country's major orchestras. Last year he was a candidate for the helms in Philadelphia and in New York, positions that ultimately went to conductors of an older generation, Christoph Eschenbach and Lorin Maazel.

Still there is a growing sense in the music world that Mr. Robertson's day is coming. Traveling the circuit throughout the year, accepting guest assignments with top orchestras like those in Chicago, Cleveland and New York, he has become an audience favorite and a reviewer's darling.

Critics frequently take note of his vitality, his range, his intellectual curiosity, his acute facility for liberating the musicians under his baton. ''This is a conductor who listens to his players and gives them the leeway to glow,'' Justin Davidson wrote in Newsday in January about Mr. Robertson's Carnegie Hall performance of Ravel's ''Valse'' with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In April Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Robertson's debut with the New York Philharmonic, for which he conducted Schoenberg's ''Erwartung,'' was ''tremendously exciting'' and ''a tantalizing hint of what might have been.''

At the profession's elite levels, conducting often remains an old man's pursuit. Mr. Robertson is still a relative youngster, and the understanding in the business is that there is still plenty of time for a world-class posting. ''I certainly would think he would have to be looked on as a serious potential music director of a major orchestra of the world in the next 5 to 10 years,'' observed Henry Fogel, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Globe-trotting is a given in the life of an ambitious, up-and-coming conductor. Mr. Robertson lives in Lyon but spends much of his time on the road, visiting his young sons, who live with his former wife in Germany, or leading the great ensembles dispersed among the great cities. On top of that, there are his duties in Lyon, which include putting together the arts programming for the Maurice Ravel Auditorium.

''I'm really lucky,'' he said of his guest-artist status. ''I look at it as a great honor to work with all the groups I do. And if something else comes up, that will be tremendous, too.''

He arrived in Philadelphia in late October for two weeks of concerts, the music already swimming in his head. The first program was to open with ''Different Trains,'' followed by Mahler's Fourth Symphony; the next week he was to lead a second program that featured works by Copland, Stravinsky and Mendelssohn. The elements of the performances are worked out months or even years in advance, and depending on how well the guest artist and the institution's music director know each other, a program can be designed by either one or both.

First-rank orchestras like Philadelphia pick and choose from among the best conductors and soloists in the world to fill their seasons; Joseph Kluger, the orchestra's president, said that of the 634 conductors who were on an initial list put together by the search committee in a process that eventually settled on Mr. Eschenbach about 10 percent had performed with Philadelphia in the last decade.

A variety of subjective criteria can determine who will be invited to fill the guest conductor's slots, ranging from how good a fit they might be with the musicians to how adept they are with various aspects of the repertory and the buzz about them in the business.